Gulag vs. Guantanamo

Amnesty International, in a moment of rhetorical hyperbole, made a serious error in comparing the War on Terror prison system to the former Soviet Union's Gulag system: The scale of the camps is vastly different, and the moral comparison fails as a result.

Nevertheless, it's unfair for TNR and other critics to focus strictly on a Gulag vs. Guantanamo comparison: Guantanamo is merely the most prominent example of the U.S.'s new Geneva-Convention-free approach to handling prisoners. We have other camps besides Guantanamo, in Iraq, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, etc. In that sense, the gulag comparison is apt: remember, Alexander Solzhenitsyn called his masterwork 'The Gulag Archiplego,' which catches the sprinkled, scattered (and thus omnipresent) nature of the system well. We have a smaller, but even more scattered archipelago: certainly less omnipresent, but nevertheless a serious danger to our moral health.